Not too long ago, the Fayetteville, Ark., school district rebuilt Jefferson Elementary School.
Rather than keep the name of the third president of the United States, the district decided to look for a new name.
How about former Arkansas governor and former U.S. President Bill Clinton? How about longtime U.S. Sen. William Fulbright, who was a champion of higher education?
Too controversial. Instead, the new school is Owl Creek Elementary, after a small ditch with a trickle of water that runs near the school. Florida schools are twice as likely to be named for a manatee than for George Washington.
Closer to home, Puyallup decided against several local human namesakes and christened a new junior high school Glacier View.
“It is increasingly rare for schools to be named after presidents – or people in general – and increasingly common to name schools after natural features,” wrote Jay P. Greene in a report for the Manhattan Institute called “What’s in a Name? The Decline in The Civic Mission of School Names.”
But this isn’t about schools or school names. Not directly, anyway. It is instead about our collective reluctance to honor real people by naming civic things – schools, highways, parks, buildings, streets – after them. People have flaws. And if they lived a life worth anything they have enemies.
So no matter their accomplishments, they are discarded. Rather than learn the stories behind the names of places, kids wonder why everything is named Skyview.
Which makes last week’s meeting of the Landmarks and Preservation Commission in Tacoma even more remarkable. In one meeting, the commission heard three nominations by Mayor Bill Baarsma to name three city places after people – local people at that.
A small-but-prominent urban park near city hall should be named for Ben Gilbert, Baarsma said. The stretch of Broadway between the Murano Hotel and the convention center should be named for Harry P. Cain. And a little park on South D and 80th Street should be named Ryan’s Park after Ryan Hade.
Those names carry with them interesting and important life stories.
Gilbert was a longtime newspaperman, rising to be city editor of the Washington Post during the 1970s. After spending time in public television helping start the program that would become “The Newshour with Jim Lehrer” and serving as the planning director for Washington, D.C., he came west.
Ben told me he moved both to be closer to his daughter and to escape the heat and humidity of the district’s summers. Once here, he served 18 years on the Landmarks Commission.
Gilbert helped the commission navigate its infancy. He realized that it could be strident and lose political support or be reasonable and actually accomplish its goals. Largely because of Ben, the city has an ingrained ethic of preserving its physical heritage.
Cain is considered the city’s first modern mayor. Elected in 1940, he helped Tacoma manage through the physical, economic and social upheaval of World War II. He tried to stand up to those who wanted Japanese residents and Japanese Americans removed from the West Coast during the war (the stretch of Broadway that may bear his name was the heart of Japantown).
Later, he took a leave to serve with the Army in Europe and was presented the Legion of Merit, three Bronze Stars and five battle stars. Later still, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he was both a red-baiting supporter of Sen. Joe McCarthy and then a defender of those falsely accused of Communist sympathies.
At age 7, Ryan was raped, mutilated and choked by a recently released sex offender in South Tacoma. Ryan survived and became a symbol of a powerful grassroots movement that resulted in passage of new laws to monitor sex offenders.
He died in a motorcycle accident in 2005. Only then did it become widely known that Ryan Hade was Tacoma’s “Little Boy.”
All the nominations are expected to be approved. Perhaps it will start a trend.
Peter Callaghan: 253-597-8657
peter.callaghan@thenewstribune.com
blogs.thenewstribune.com/politics
